Moving off a legacy PBX without a bad weekend
A practical migration order for teams still running on-premise hardware, including what to port first and what to leave until last.
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Key takeaways
- Run the new platform alongside the old one for two weeks instead of planning a single cutover.
- Port a low-traffic departmental line first so you see porting behaviour before it hits sales.
- Transcribe every legacy routing rule before rebuilding; most teams delete about a third.
- Keep a documented rollback available through a full month-end cycle.
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GeminiRun both systems on purpose
The mistake is treating migration as a cutover. Run the new platform alongside the old one for two weeks with a small team on it. You will find the three routing rules nobody documented, and you will find them on a Tuesday afternoon rather than at 8am on a Monday.
Port the least important number first
Start with a departmental line or a number that receives modest traffic. Porting has a small window where calls can behave oddly, and you want to have seen that behaviour once before it happens to your main sales line.
Write the flows down before you rebuild them
Legacy systems encode a decade of decisions. Before rebuilding, export or transcribe every rule, then ask which ones are still true. Most teams delete about a third of their routing during migration simply because nobody could justify it any more.
Keep a rollback for a fortnight
Do not release the old service the moment the port completes. Keep it available, with a documented rollback, until you have been through a full month-end and whatever your busiest cycle is. The cost of two extra weeks is trivial next to a bad week of missed calls.
Put this into practice in an afternoon
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Written by
Julia HoffmannHead of Security
Julia leads security and compliance at Votelly. She writes about encryption, retention and how to get a communications platform through a security review without a six-month detour.
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